Media Coverage

Media Coverage

Before modern mass media was at hand, giant news events could not be made known to the public until long after they occurred. The media has always made disasters and wars the large news stories. These have always been the prime news events for the last few decades. And with the development of television and other technologies the ability to show the public what is going on became easier and easier. Now that mass media was available the public could almost immediately view or read about disasters and wars. Average Americans could now sit in their living rooms and watch what was happening in the Vietnam War. They witnessed the explosion of the space shuttle challenger. They saw the scared teenagers run from Columbine. Perhaps the most stunning of all the events that mass media brought into our homes was the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City. Mass media has grown so much in such a short period of time and society is having trouble dealing with it. Some question if the public needs to see such terrible things on television. Some wonder if the media truthfully portray the events. Media today is so large and it conceivably could be damaging to our society. If we take a look at past events, and the recent September 11th tragedy, we can critique the media's handling of them. To become more media literate we need to understand how events such as disasters and war have been handled in the past.

Its been called "The New day of Infamy" "worse than pearl harbor" and when you see how many americans have been killed and affected by the tragedy of September 11th, it is. Estimated innocent casualties range in the thousands but the informed americans on that morning seemed to be every last citizen. At 8:48 in t...

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...eported on continually. After looking at these events we can see that there are many different aspects of the coverage that one can critique for themselves. This has been merely a independent look at how past events that the media has covered relate to the recent ones. Hopefully after reading about the coverage of the past events one can better understand the recent coverage of September 11th and its aftermath. This media literacy can then be used when being a witness of future events when they occur. In the end, Manson asks the question is entertainment or music to blame? The answer is no. He challenged media commentators to ask themselves that question, because their coverage of the event "was some of the most gruesome entertainment any of us has seen" (Manson, page 3 of 3). You can clearly see that the media went to far in reporting this situation to the public.